A different lifetime
To be honest….it feels like a lifetime ago.
Eight years is a long time. Or it’s no time at all. OK, time is subjective. But at this point in my life, the changes over eight years have been incredible. In the past eight years I’ve finished my doctorate, moved states, started two new jobs, had two new babies. Every cell in my body has turned over….I’m not even the same person, physically. And those are just the external benchmarks.
Internally, it’s a different universe. I’ve gone through incredible changes in eight years. I’ve gotten honest. I’ve become spiritually connected to my life. I’ve gotten a lot more aware of the passage of time, how life can be extinguished in an instant. I look back at my time with Isla and celebrate the fact that I was so young and optimistic that I refused to ever consider things wouldn’t work out. I assumed she’d always be there, she’d persevere despite tough beginnings, and we’d get to do everything we wanted to do - our lives would just look a little different.
I look up now, eight years later, with two growing boys in a different life and the pictures are shocking to me. Our family looks so different. It feels so different. The rhythm of life is so much quicker, the things we cry about are so much less important. That perspective may sound a little fucked up, but it keeps me afloat. I know 6-year-old Lorenzo can’t tell the difference in his feelings between an older sister he never met and a broken monster truck - in fact, I know the broken monster truck is more upsetting! - but his emotions are big and overwhelming, and I get to be a part of them. I’ll gladly support his mood swings when I know his body and mind are healthy, he is experiencing life exactly the way a kindergartener is supposed to experience it, and I am physically and emotionally able to help him grow.
I think that’s the difference. I get to be here.
I get to help Lorenzo when he skins his knee or bruises his pride. I get to fold Leo’s teeny tiny little underwear and help him take a bath when he doesn’t want to, but his feet are caked with dirt and smell like rotting cheese. I get to clean up pee and poop in the morning when cancerous old Bumblebee gets incontinent overnight. I get to have hard conversations with Dan. Heck, I get to work from home and be here for all of it, to drift in and out of family and work life. My life isn’t siloed into Hospital and Other as it was during those precarious five months of Isla’s life. I get to be in the middle of it.
That’s the privilege I have, as a mom here on earth. That’s the gratitude I have to actively try to cultivate every day to keep from getting sucked into the vortex of grief, the mindset of Poor Me, the tidal wave of victimhood.
The challenge now is to figure out how to reconcile these two lifetimes. The Before and the After. In the beginning, the overwhelming sense of loss was so great I couldn’t even think about what life would be life later. But here it is. Her possessions are in a shoebox, there are no new pictures to hang, I have no concept of what life would be like to have an 8 year old girl. Some of her things are mainstays in our home and always will be - but once the baby outgrows them, it will be different. Another step into the future and away from the past.
How do I talk about Isla to her brothers? How do I stay connected with her? How do I honor her memory without letting her life become a footnote in mine?
No answers here. Just reflections today - and gratitude for being able to put them out into the universe. I hope she knows how much I love her.
